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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25741858">Genesis</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglishLanguage/pseuds/EnglishLanguage'>EnglishLanguage</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Also Featuring Boneless Programs, Author Does a Little Worldbuilding, Does this fic take itself too seriously?, Enemies to Friends, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Implied/Referenced Fantastic Racism, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mentions of genocide, Other, Post-Canon, Sam Does a Lot of Worldbuilding, Selectively Mute Rinzler, maybe but the working title was funkyfresh.jpg so there's that, religious discussions</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 02:41:27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>13,273</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25741858</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglishLanguage/pseuds/EnglishLanguage</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Clu’s reintegration with Kevin Flynn burns the Grid to ashes. Sam rebuilds.</p><p>//</p><p>Prompt: <em>Where did we come from?</em></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Sam Flynn &amp; Quorra, Sam Flynn/Tron</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>58</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Genesis</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This was supposed to be a 1K exercise in imagery, but it seems to have mutated into a 12K (and counting) monster with three chapters and a vague plot. Good fun.</p><p>:D :D :D</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>- Genesis 1:2</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>//</em>
</p><p> </p><p>There’s no comprehending the universe.</p><p>No comprehending the true expanse of infinity. Or how existence tipped into being when there was nothing and no one to push it. Or that the universe was once a single point, fire-bloated and impossible, with everything nowhere and eternities crushed into a blink of light, and Sam has no idea what it is to not be, but.</p><p>But.</p><p>He imagines this is as close as he’ll get to understanding.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Sam stood at ground zero of the reintegration, a total system reset. (The Big Bang, <em>if you will—</em>and yeah, turns out he will, because Sam Flynn carries dry humor like a skeleton, like a crutch.)</p><p>He should remember how the explosion felt, the edge of a blast wave knocking him off his feet. He should remember the sound. But his brain only recorded the horror: a molten pressure on his chest, the slick burn of iron at the back of his throat. Like swallowed lightning, an implosion.</p><p>He <em>watched</em> his dad die. Watched Clu die, too, in a shuffling semblance of balance. Justice, maybe. Not victory—if it were victory, it wouldn’t have settled itself, slick and dense, in Sam’s gut like hemorrhage.</p><p>Sam stood at ground zero of the reintegration, and now he stands in the aftermath. <em>Now,</em> he’s staring down nonexistence, infinity, a universe reborn and still stained with the ashes of what was, before.</p><p>Around him, the beacon-light of the portal blazes, steady, like the flame off a blowtorch. There’s a faint warmth to it, a pulse, and Sam tips his head back. Breathes. An electric current, white-hot and sluggish, tugs at the corners of his leather jacket, crawls sharp beneath his skin. It tastes of <em>power,</em> of something vast and yearning, something that catches hold of his hands, pulls him—</p><p>He blinks.</p><p>Feels a stifled gasp pull, shaking, through his throat.</p><p>He doesn’t need to go through with this. Doesn’t need to step outside the protective glow of the portal. Doesn’t need to spend another second in the ruins of his dad’s mistakes, but Sam has never known when to let something go: he takes a step forward.</p><p>Another, and this time it’s easier to brush off the fear.</p><p>There’s no one else here, except Sam. Nothing but a delicate, bloated silence.</p><p>
  <em>Are you sure about that?</em>
</p><p>Disc already out, held above his head, he stumbles back into the portal.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>He tries again, because the Grid is a constant ache beneath his ribs, and he thinks this—<em>this</em> is Kevin Flynn’s legacy. Curiosity and dependence and a barbed hook through his gut, black gangrene burrowed into his bones. <em>It was always going to come to this, wasn’t it? Chasing my father’s shadow, getting dragged into the Grid. Into this wreckage</em>.</p><p>Behind him, the portal lacerates the oppressive darkness. The beam of light extends upward, and Sam tracks its path through the sky to the point that it narrows and blinks out of view, to the point that Sam’s known reality ends and eternity begins. Around itself, the portal illuminates a circle, about five feet in diameter, stained blue and softly lambent. Barely visible in the light, flecks of ash drift in slow languor; they catch and float on nonexistent curls of wind. As far as he can see (and it isn’t far; he’s breathing straight into an abyss), the air is clogged with debris, smoke-mottled. Abruptly, a chlorinated sting in Sam’s throat, a slight rattle in his chest, take on new significance.</p><p>There’s particulate matter. A lot of it.</p><p>His stomach bucks.</p><p>Seems like sometimes, his memories of the Grid hold themselves out of reach—just a dull burn behind his eyes, a phantom weight on his shoulders. An inaccessible itch, located anywhere except his mind. Seems like a half-forgotten dream, a nightmare, and Sam remembers <em>terror</em>, sure, but not the steps he should take to rez a helmet.</p><p>With one hand, he plucks at the collar of his shirt, drags it up over his nose and pins it there. With the other, he reaches for the nape of his neck, desperate. Fingers twitch, winding sharply around strands of hair. There should be something like a muted burst of static, a release—</p><p>The glossy panes of a helmet fold over his face, and Sam breathes.</p><p>Gasps for air.</p><p><em>Everything’s gone. Everyone,</em> he thinks, and <em>I’ll have to filter the ashes out of the air,</em> and <em>is this even something I should fix?</em></p><p>
  <em>How do I lay an idea to rest?</em>
</p><p>(The answer being simple: he can’t.)</p><p>Sam drops to one knee hard; the impact shudders through his bones, breaks a bruise into his skin. Which—surprises him. The ground here is nothing like the dusty terrain he expected. Instead? He splays his hand flat against the floor, feels the sleek polish of a glass-hard surface. There’s no texture. No coloring, besides a standard black. It’s just… raw.</p><p>At the blurred limits of the portal’s light, the Sea of Simulation scrapes against solid ground. It surrounds him, eats at the edges of the island where Sam stands. As far as he can see, the tar-black ocean holds still and smooth, infinitely broad and infinitely deep.</p><p>Sam doesn’t dare place a hand in the water. Doesn’t want to dwell on why.</p><p>(But no one can lay an idea to rest.)</p><p>If he wants to get anything done here, he’ll have to make this platform larger. Not by much, nothing more than he can see the edges of at all times—a square mile, maybe less. Just a few first steps into an expanding universe.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>He constructs a sort of headquarters: one roof, no walls, more of a pavilion than a legitimate building. Which suits him fine—if nothing else, it keeps the Grid’s <em>remains</em> from accumulating on his head and shoulders like a macabre snowfall. Sam’s pavilion sits close enough to the portal to share its brightness, but a series of white-lit circuits on the ceiling steeps the interior in its own, cool glow that strains through the darkness, beckons.</p><p>One light left on in the kitchen.</p><p>In terms of identity, Sam has no idea what he is, but it’s easy enough to decide what he isn’t. Example given, an urban planner. He drew up his blueprints for a new city in the basement of his dad’s old arcade, trying to soak up intelligence, inspiration, anything—and getting nothing but dust in his lungs for his efforts. Scrolling through the blueprints now, Sam knows they’re rudimentary. Clumsy. <em>Adequate,</em> because Sam is the only user here; in terms of creation, he has no competition.</p><p>Turns out it’s easy for God to claim perfection.</p><p>For a week now, user time, he’s been toying with details on his diagrams, shifting street corners, flirting with more intricate circuit designs on the facades of buildings. The land surrounding him remains empty, desolate. His procrastination sits wrong on his shoulders, hefty and dense; it’s got whole <em>layers</em> to it.</p><p>Concern one: as stated. He’s no architect, no civil engineer, and he’s dissatisfied with his city layout.</p><p>Concern two: he <em>is</em> a programmer, but he’s not Kevin Flynn. He’s no leader, no visionary, and he’s never written a society into existence. Never written a life.</p><p>Concern three: in a universe of potential, Sam sees only the risks.</p><p>Currently, cyberspace is running two for two on failed civilizations. Two for two on realities so swollen with corruption, with base human nature, that they collapsed into autocracy and torture and genocide. And imperfection is a monumental weight to shift onto Atlas’s shoulders. Sam would know—he saw what it did to his dad.</p><p>
  <em>Science, philosophy, every idea man has ever had about the universe up for grabs.</em>
</p><p>Sam thinks of a woman, hunched over his kitchen table. A too-large t-shirt clings to her shoulder blades, all wrinkles and sudden, skeletal angles. The light plays strangely over her face, bitter yellow where Sam’s brain expects ice blue. She says that she’s always belonged to the users. That Flynn assigned her purpose, but she doesn’t know how to fulfill it.</p><p>
  <em>The ISOs, they were going to be my gift to the world.</em>
</p><p>Sam thinks of Quorra, and how she was supposed to be free.</p><p>
  <em>For science, for penance, for loyalty—how far do you dare crawl into the void?</em>
</p><p>Looking out over the yawning sea, Sam finds no answers. But he figures he’ll start with another square mile.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Eight streets, latticework on the blank slate of the Grid.</p><p>Seventy-two buildings, plain-faced. Hollow (gutted) on the inside.</p><p>Clean air, finally.</p><p>He should be proud of himself, and sure, there’s always a brief spark of satisfaction, draining warmth into his heart, when he stands back and appraises his creation.</p><p>The key word being <em>brief.</em></p><p>It’s not the pride that lingers, but a sort of unease building up sharp in his nerves. Sam carries it in his twitching hands, like splinters caught in his fingertips. He also carries it high in his chest, hair-thin wires drawn down his throat and through his heart.</p><p>It’s just that there are too many corners he can’t see around. Too many shadows, smeared dark across walls, catching at the corners of his eyes.</p><p>This city, with its skin and bone skyscrapers, is a liminal space. A rough draft, a moment in the universe; blink and you’ll miss it. Sam wanders the streets, lips chewed to ragged copper, and leaves pieces of himself behind—a stray thought, a jolt of restive energy—that’ll be glossed over, forgotten, never seen or felt again.</p><p>Sam wanders the streets, alone, creating his own ghosts.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>(He doesn’t even notice when one wraith shows up of its own volition.)</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The realization comes in moments.</p><p>Flashes.</p><p>He’s on his knees in the middle of a street, inspecting a glitch knotted deep into the pavement. At the corner of his eye, a shadow quivers, and Sam <em>freezes</em>. Hands gone numb, steel rebar shot through his muscles: the whole schtick.</p><p>He breaks out of his fear in slow increments, one twitch at a time, until he’s on his feet, searching. Convincing himself that, yeah, it could’ve been his own shadow moving; he was fidgeting enough for it.</p><p>
  <em>Right.</em>
</p><p>Later, he’s heading back to the portal; he’s exhausted, his guard is down. He blinks, and thinks he sees a brief shiver of white light to his left, in the murky depths of a window.</p><p>Nervous suspicion builds gradually, over a few days—a damp-cold sting beneath his skin, like he’s being watched. Like something’s wrong, different, shifted an inch to the left, and Sam <em>feels</em> it more than he <em>knows</em> it. So he brushes it off. Chalks it up to an overactive imagination, to hours spent alone on the eggshell frontier between existence and nonbeing. Between form and void. After death, before life.</p><p>
  <em>Ignore it ignore it ignore it.</em>
</p><p>But he can’t ignore the noise.</p><p>Can’t explain it away when curiosity carries him through the emaciated mouth of a building, and Sam immediately hears the distant scuffle of some entity retreating into soft shadows. Out of sight. One hand resting at the crook of his neck, by his disc, he creeps forward... but balks at the sound of a low, warning growl.</p><p>A familiar sound.</p><p>His heart drops into his stomach.</p><p>The growl hitches, rattles down a jawbone of stairs running perpendicular to the building’s gaping entryway. Sam fixes his eyes on that nebulous darkness, just ahead and above of him, stifling sour fear. If the intruder were standing there, staring, Sam would be able to see the bright circuitry on his armor. Which means there must be a fair amount of space between them, a buffer, and Sam?</p><p>Sam can work with that. <em>Has</em> to work with that.</p><p>Slowly, toe to heel, he steps backward.</p><p>The rattle falls flat, sands itself down into a low hiss.</p><p>
  <em>I’m not dead yet.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He’s been here, watching me, who knows for how long—and I’m not dead.</em>
</p><p>Sam doesn’t know what to say: <em>I think I noticed you’re running your circuits white, now,</em> or <em>what do you want from me,</em> or <em>how did you survive?</em> The last question bleeds bitter on his tongue, washes up against the back of his teeth, warps itself into something other, something vicious. <em>You’re supposed to be dead.</em></p><p>“I’m leaving,” Sam negotiates, and his voice echoes dry, heat-leeched and weak, off the walls and ceiling. “Don’t follow me.” He winces, softens his voice: “please.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Sam is not alone on the Grid. Ergo, it’d be stupid of him to go back.</p><p>
  <em>So what?</em>
</p><p>He’s never had a claim on his dad’s genius.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It’s not so difficult, once Sam knows what to look for: the vague outline of hunched shoulders; a smattering of circuits, like stars, bleeding through grey shadows.</p><p>Sam clings to the portal, his escape route, and Rinzler shies from the light like a creature burned. Like a skittish animal. The agility and lethal precision that Sam remembers so well seem shattered, reduced to hesitance and flinching and something horribly human. Wounded.</p><p>It’s easier to function when Rinzler stays on Sam’s visual radar, holding himself low to the ground and far out of reach. It’s easier to breathe right, clockwork gears running smooth in Sam’s chest, and it’s easier to hold his ground.</p><p>
  <em>You hurt me.</em>
</p><p><em>Don’t you dare try it again</em>.</p><p>Rinzler always crouches, perched low on his toes, always holds his snarl near-silent, always twitches—flinches, maybe, and definitely startles Sam—whenever Sam moves too quickly. He always stares, through that beetle-shell helmet of his, as if Sam were hunting him instead of the other way around. The <em>logical</em> way around.</p><p>It’s all wrong. Off-kilter.</p><p>On the other side of the screen, Sam can’t imagine what a malfunction this severe would even <em>look</em> like—lines of code misfiring, a body left crooked, corroded.</p><p>It isn’t fair, isn’t reasonable, but the program doesn’t register as a threat to Sam. Not like this: as lost and desperate (as <em>familiar</em>) as Sam’s own reflection in any mirror. He gets the sense—and hates himself for thinking it—that Rinzler is more afraid of Sam than Sam is of him.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Today as always, Rinzler’s silhouette is a vacuum in the darkness, fathomless. Somewhere past the void, behind plated armor and a helmet—black-saturated, decaying light snagging at sharp corners—there exists a living being. So Sam stares down the void and tries to communicate with it.</p><p>“Here’s a problem,” he states, and doesn’t think he’s imagining how Rinzler lurches back, goes stiff at the edges. “The laws of physics seem pretty well-established in here; I didn’t even need to write them in. Dunno what’s up with that.”</p><p>He isn’t sure what it implies, either—maybe mechanics, quantum and classical, are inherent to existence. Maybe more of his dad’s coding survived reintegration than Sam was initially aware of.</p><p>Maybe the Grid Sam remembers, ethereally intricate and war-torn in turns, still exists somewhere. Maybe deep beneath him, entombed by the virulent sea.</p><p>“Anyway.” He shakes his head, doesn’t dwell on the possibility that he’s standing on, building over, a mass grave. “If there’s gravity acting on me, there’s gravity acting on this city. Which means I have to start thinking about whether or not the buildings are structurally stable. I could just assume they are—”</p><p>Rinzler’s head snaps up.</p><p>“Yeah, I know.” It’d be easier to assume safety, but now that Sam is face to face with a program, a likely inhabitant of those buildings, the idea of cutting corners twists sharp in his gut. “It’d really suck if I killed you with a flimsy roof.”</p><p>The honesty of the statement surprises him.</p><p>Gnawing at his lip, Sam scans his blueprints, questions whether this wall or that pillar would survive a motorcycle crash, an explosion, or full occupancy of a hundred or so programs. “Guess I should brush up on building codes. What do you think?”</p><p>He looks for Rinzler. Finds nothing.</p><p>
  <em>Crazy program finally ran away. And the trophy goes to Sam Flynn for managing to scare him off.</em>
</p><p>A sigh swells up in his lungs, and Sam tucks it away, shrugs an unspoken weight off his shoulders. “Alright—” <em>if you’re still listening</em>— “just try not to get crushed while I’m gone.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Rinzler inches closer to Sam.</p><p>Gradually.</p><p>It’s a work in progress.</p><p>Hope, eager and sharp-edged in his chest, reminds Sam constantly that he’s still alive, still in possession of all four limbs; Rinzler has made no move to attack him. Common sense, on the other hand, has him holding on to a healthy wariness of the program. It doesn’t seem like Rinzler (to be fair, nothing Rinzler does these days seems like Rinzler), but there’s a chance he’s just biding his time before the kill. Luring Sam into a false sense of security.</p><p>
  <em>That… makes sense. Right?</em>
</p><p>Common sense notices the way Rinzler follows him, circles him, and marks it as predatory.</p><p>Hope (or loneliness, or fatigue, but it’s all the same in Sam’s head) takes one look at Rinzler and thinks, <em>cat.</em></p><p>Thinks feline, a stray, shy and irritable and easily spooked. And maybe if Sam gives Rinzler his space, doesn’t freak him out, just takes his presence in stride—they both might manage to survive each other.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The Grid is veiled pitch black, and Sam struggles to peer through air like smoke, like blood in the water. But it isn’t until he stops squinting and tackles the problem, programming a labyrinth of circuits into his city’s fledgling infrastructure, that he notices just how many details he missed in the smothering darkness.</p><p>Namely, the fractures in Rinzler’s armor.</p><p>There’s a crack in his helmet, lightning-forked. Left arm hanging to his shoulder by a splinter. Ragged craters torn through his torso—his chest is deflated, <em>partially collapsed;</em> Sam vividly remembers when he first noticed the injury, how his breath crimped up in his throat like a ribbon, choking him—</p><p>Point is—</p><p>
  <em>Crap, that looks bad. Lethal? I don’t know?</em>
</p><p>Point is.</p><p>There are fractures in Rinzler’s armor, and Sam examines them out of the corner of his eye, figures the damage came from Rinzler’s fall into the sea from a mile in the air. He still doesn’t know how Rinzler survived—although programs don’t have any bones to break, so that’s an advantage. What’s more, Sam can’t fathom how Rinzler managed to swim to shore in his condition.</p><p>The mutilation explains other things, though. Such as the way Rinzler walks, movements heavy and frustrated with pain. Such as the way he carries himself like shattered glass, all curled up around his center, as if he’s holding on and holding himself together, but the fragments keep spilling out of his hands.</p><p>“You’re hurt,” Sam says, shaky, and “here, let me take a look.”</p><p>Rinzler pulls back.</p><p>Sam thinks he understands. He knows that he holds power over this place, over Rinzler. That he poses as much of a threat to the Grid as it might pose to him, and maybe that’s part of why he feels so unwelcome here.</p><p>So he doesn’t argue.</p><p>So he keeps an eye on Rinzler, regardless, just in case his injuries deteriorate and break him down to voxels. He’s become accustomed to Rinzler’s presence, to sharing this burden of creation with another person, and Sam isn’t willing to give that up without a fight.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>This time around, he announces his arrival, all feet scuffing loud on the floor and “Hey, I’m here.”</p><p>
  <em>Hey, I’m home.</em>
</p><p>He leaves too much of himself in the Grid for it to be anything less than that. Anything less than an uncanny reflection of his mind, soot-blackened and damp at the corners and pulsing with the heartbeat Sam gave it.</p><p>Sam thinks of his dad, scattered and janiform, half a man and half a god. Wonders how much of himself he’d have to lose to this world—his focus, his heart, his <em>face</em>—before he’d become just another Kevin Flynn. Caught between two realities, torn apart.</p><p>Then he thinks of Quorra, who makes it simple: she belongs where she pleases, and she’ll fight anyone who argues otherwise. And he no longer feels so wretched for his wandering, for the way he’s always drawn back to the Grid.</p><p>Settling himself cross-legged on the floor of his office (it has walls, now, and a rough semblance of furniture), Sam pulls the user interface out of thin air. It’s nothing more than a sheen of data suspended a few inches off the ground, completely transparent. Through its hazy surface, Sam watches Rinzler approach the front door, limping.</p><p>Motions stiff, the program arranges himself as he always does, knees pulled to his chin, back half-turned to Sam and half-turned to the world outside. As if he can’t decide which poses a larger threat. As if Rinzler doesn’t recall that he already fought Sam in Clu’s arena, hand-to-hand, and utterly demolished him. Almost amputated Sam’s arm, while he was at it.</p><p>To be fair, Rinzler doesn’t have either of his discs. The mount on his shoulders is empty.</p><p>Sam… has no idea what happened there.</p><p>“How are you feeling?” he asks, and Rinzler ticks his head to the side, rattles.</p><p><em>Come on, I’ve heard you speak,</em> Sam thinks. But he doesn’t push it, because wariness rolls off in Rinzler in waves, acrid smoke off a suffocated fire. Because he doesn’t know Rinzler, but he knew Clu (he knew Kevin Flynn), and that’s enough for him to recognize that Rinzler must have suffered.</p><p>He crams his frustration into a short spasm of laughter and answers for the program. “The apathy hits hard, doesn’t it? Same here.”</p><p>In science and religion both, there’s a precedence for this: a creative force and its shadowed companion, facing down the elements and weaving together a cosmos. Entropy in the footsteps of order. The devil in the footsteps of a god, but Sam glances at the demon in the doorway and decides, <em>this time—this time, things will be different.</em></p><p>Rinzler and Sam aren’t black and white, good and evil.</p><p>As deities go, Sam makes for a reluctant one, creating a world out of obligation. Out of guilt. He holds a rigid omnipotence in his fingertips and detests it; at least human weakness sits familiar in his chest, at least it cries and struggles and <em>reeks</em> of life.</p><p>And as devils go, Rinzler is ancient, exhausted, water-stained. Not searching for glory or a fight. Already too far fallen for Sam to do much more than reach out and coax him back onto his feet.</p><p>It’s their second go-round, and Sam figures they both just want to get it right.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“You’re injured, dude. You should be resting, not walking around with me.”</p><p>Faceless, Rinzler still manages to <em>glare.</em></p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“The explosion,” Sam says, rolling the word around his mouth, tasting the ash. “Nothing else survived it.”</p><p>
  <em>Right?</em>
</p><p>Rinzler shifts in place, straightening himself out by an inch. Which wouldn’t mean much to anyone else, but Sam understands what it is to be voiceless. He knows how to run his tongue on autopilot, lost in his own head, saying a thousand empty words and meaning none of them. He knows what it’s like to lose a sentence to breathless panic. How it feels to form words in his (aching) lungs, only for them to gutter out, knot up, halfway up his throat.</p><p>So he reads Rinzler’s silence just fine.</p><p>It’s nervousness, brought on by their proximity to the sea, that carries stiff in Rinzler’s fists.</p><p>It’s disagreement, in response to Sam’s statement, that jolted Rinzler to attention.</p><p>“Awesome. D’you—” he shakes his head— “d’you know what else survived?”</p><p>Rinzler rolls a shrug off one shoulder, gestures to the water.</p><p>“The sea survived,” Sam interprets. “And you survived because you were inside it. Drowning.” Turning toward the water, Sam surveys its glassy surface, feels a muscle jump at the corner of his jaw. There’s something about the way the sea holds still, silent, under the weight of Sam’s gaze. Something tense and sluggish. Something that says <em>only dormant, and not dead.</em></p><p>“Is anything else alive in there?”</p><p>Again, Rinzler shrugs.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Sam starts by figuring out his own disc.</p><p>He rolls his shoulders back against the weight of it, memorizes how it hurts, and <em>where,</em> when his bones clip against the edges of the device. Notes that it’s too bulky to wear under his jacket without looking like a moron, but thin enough that he can slouch back in his chair and get comfortable. The handle fits perfectly between his fingers and palm, not unlike a really dense frisbee.</p><p>This is how a disc should feel.</p><p>
  <em>Got it.</em>
</p><p>The next step is to code an off-the-cuff measuring tape—he doesn’t have a reference, so he hopes he spaced the inches correctly—and check diameter, width, circumference. Circuits go here. The bladed edge fits there. And the laws of physics don’t really account for two of these weapons melding into one, but Sam’s brain short-circuits around that particular detail, leaving it for later.</p><p>This? This is how a disc should look.</p><p>Finally, Sam strips his disc down to intangibility, to a network of lines, neon blue, that spark at his fingertips when he pokes at them. The code holding the weapon together is… complex. To say the least. Ones and zeroes and combat subroutines and storage for memories, for <em>minds.</em></p><p>There’s a certain intensity of detachment involved in using these discs, throwing your literal life into a battle, and Sam never fully appreciated it until now.</p><p>He closes the interface on his disc, holds the device up for Rinzler to see. “Is there anything you’d change about the design of these things?” he asks.</p><p>Rinzler pauses. Shakes his head, and Sam notices (again) how the motion stunts itself, pulls short just before it’d aggravate the program’s damaged arm.</p><p>“Cool.”</p><p>Silence slips between them like a sigh, like a flicker of fresh air parting through listless skies.</p><p>Sam pulls up the code he’s been working on, scrolls through it. There are still too many errors, mistakes, functions that he wants to tweak even if he doesn’t strictly need to. Reclining back in his chair, he pulls up his feet, crosses his legs. Settles in. Beside him, as if taking cues from Sam’s posture (<em>we’re gonna be here for a while</em>), Rinzler gingerly relinquishes his stance—weight on his toes, shoulders stiff—and sits down. Sam watches the program lean against the wall, resing his ruined arm in his lap and letting his head fall back with a faint click.</p><p>“It’s strange, y’know,” he starts, fishing for conversation, and he has to bite his tongue for a moment as he organizes his thoughts into something semi-coherent. “You really scared me when you first showed up here.”</p><p>Rinzler’s growl stumbles over itself, flares up loud and harsh. It sounds almost... <em>offended.</em></p><p>At that, Sam exhales laughter, forces his shoulders back against the dry shudder that coils around his spine. “C’mon, dude, I thought you were dead. I couldn’t exactly be sure what had crawled out of that ocean wearing your body.”</p><p>Something water-rotted, bleeding salt from its ears and damp darkness from drowned lungs. Something bloated with the stench of death, thick and sweet and all too human.</p><p>Something more like the ruined corpse Sam envisions when he thinks of his dad.</p><p>He glances away from his work, lets his gaze wander over Rinzler’s body—all neat edges and sleek circuits stained bright, curves of shoulders and biceps and calves graceful and <em>alive</em> within the gnarled carapace of his armor. He’s wounded, definitely, but not a ghost.</p><p>“I expected some kind of deep-ocean demon, and I got you instead,” Sam teases, absently. “The equivalent of a wet sock.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>His knees ache.</p><p>Kinda like paper, after being creased one too many times.</p><p>So Sam unfolds himself, plants two feet on the floor and arches his back until he feels the top of his chair digging into his shoulders. Some muscle at the base of his neck catches, gnaws at him—and <em>yeah, sure</em>, he really should improve his computer posture. Collapsing down into the curve of his spine isn’t an ideal position to sit in.</p><p>“Done,” he announces, and in his periphery, Rinzler shifts for the first time in hours. The flecks of light on the program’s chest flicker, flare bright, from waist to throat. “I mean, it isn’t perfect, but—”</p><p><em>Last chance to give up on this</em>, he thinks, and if asked what <em>this</em> is, he wouldn’t know what to say. <em>This project, maybe. Rinzler. The Grid. Everything.</em></p><p>“Take it,” and the words, hallowed, scald his tongue, “it’s yours.”</p><p>With one hand, he holds up a disc. With a thought, he ignites it, watches delicate circuits stutter to life: first, the interior light lines, burning steady; second, the bladed halo, melting the air into a white-scorched haze. The heat of the disc soaks gently into his skin, all neon light and evening-warmth, harmless.</p><p>Except that Sam knows how much damage this weapon can inflict.</p><p>(Except that Sam’s fear belongs to a different war, a different life, and he’s too tired to carry it any farther.)</p><p>Maneuvering himself onto his feet, Sam steps forward. Rinzler <em>flinches</em> away, flattens himself against the wall. And Sam doesn’t know what expression to read into the blank face of his helmet. Doesn’t know anything, except that Rinzler is trembling, and every breath aches like gasoline in Sam’s lungs, and he’s holding the program’s heart in his hands, palms clammy with sweat like cruor.</p><p>“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he promises. “Rinzler—look at me. I’m not gonna hurt you.” Slowly, painstakingly, Sam deactivates the disc, places it on the floor between them, and withdraws.</p><p>An olive branch.</p><p>Motions soft with hesitation, Rinzler picks up the disc, cradles it between his hands. His grip stiffens as he sheathes the weapon, as the force of the synchronization ripples through his body. His circuitry sparks bright and oversaturated, flashing a caustic red before diluting, bleaching back to an orange-blistered white. Deep in Sam’s chest, something <em>clicks</em> into place.</p><p>Rinzler sags against the wall.</p><p>And Sam stumbles backward, lets his knees give out and drop him into his chair.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It’s all in the way the sunset drips gold onto the planes of her face, scorches the hollow of her neck with thin shadows. It’s in the way her teeth flash sharp, and in the way she spits her words out blood-polished: “he deserves to be <em>killed</em>.”</p><p>Sam bites down, burns down silently; he’s holding a whole fire in his chest, but he lacks the eloquence to douse it. “Clu hurt him,” he says. “I don’t know how, or what, or—”</p><p>An inhale catches, knife-in-his-throat, at the back of his tongue.</p><p>“But I do know he deserves better.”</p><p>
  <em>I know you deserve better.</em>
</p><p>Beside him, Quorra raises a hand to shield her eyes, rolls her bottom lip between teeth. Sam knows there’s a split at the corner of her mouth that’s irritating her, but she can’t stop poking at the wound long enough for it to heal.</p><p>“If he touches you, I’ll derez him,” she says. “Slowly.”</p><p>And Sam could ask how, reminding her that she resolved never to set foot on the Grid again. Could reply that he thinks they all came out of reintegration a little too broken, a little too scarlet-stained, and it <em>scares</em> him.</p><p>Instead, Sam nudges her, elbow in ribs, and chokes up laughter. “Love you too, Quorra.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>There’s a time difference between the Grid and the user world—a thousand years to twenty, or something like that.</p><p>And Sam can’t be certain whether that’s still intact. Whether the Grid, still raw with damage, moves slower than it used to. Whether or not time passes in the Grid at all, or if <em>pastpresentfuture</em> all blur together, if creation and nothingness and awareness all coexist on the verge of collapse.</p><p>He wonders what Rinzler does, whenever Sam leaves, and asks the program as much.</p><p>Rinzler gestures at the shell of a city looming above them, a post-apocalyptic landscape. (Correction: pre-apocalyptic, but Sam isn’t going to stress over that. Not yet.)</p><p>“You’re exploring?” Sam asks.</p><p>A slight twist of one hand: <em>sort of</em>.</p><p>Rinzler leads Sam—and it’s the first time the program’s ever turned his back on him; Sam tries and <em>tries</em> not to read into it, but fails—through the network of roads, two left turns and one right. The skyscraper in front of them is near-identical to the others on the street, except for an unexpected lack of circuitry illuminating its exterior.</p><p>“Dunno how I missed that one,” Sam mutters. It’ll be an easy fix, though. “Thanks for—” noticing? Inspecting the city? “Thanks for making sure everything’s working correctly.”</p><p>Whatever Rinzler is, whatever Clu molded him into, turns out he still has a strain of <em>security program</em> running through his code. It’s there in the way he seamlessly fits himself into Sam’s routine, shadowing him like a bodyguard instead of a wary animal. It’s there when they check the rest of the street, just in case, and Rinzler walks into buildings first, assessing them floor to ceiling, before allowing Sam to enter.</p><p>It’s there in his posture, more solid and self-assured than before, as if Rinzler was lost, lopsided, without his disc on his shoulders.</p><p>(Admittedly, Sam doesn’t <em>exactly</em> know what a disc does for a program—maybe it connects them to the system, to some sort of data backup. Maybe Rinzler has access to memories and subroutines he was previously lacking. And if that’s true, Sam has a furious word or two stuck in his throat regarding Rinzler’s self-repair processes, which are either unmitigated crap or <em>entirely nonexistent.</em>)</p><p>For the most part, the city and its infrastructure hold up to Rinzler’s unspoken standards. Sam doesn’t know whether to interpret his companion's lack of complaint as <em>good job</em> or <em>it’ll do</em>, so he just rolls with it. Figures that a rough draft is his first priority; aesthetics, a distant second. And regardless, there exists a sort of raw, spit-and-tape beauty in dust-choked nebulas and newborn stars, in the roughshod cosmos he’s started here.</p><p>“Anything screwy in this building?” he questions, and Rinzler shakes his head, waves Sam forward with his one functional hand.</p><p>“This one?” <em>No.</em></p><p>“How’re you feeling about this one?”</p><p>And Rinzler pauses. Tips his head to the side, ever so slightly, in the way Sam always interprets as a frown.</p><p>“Alright. Not bad,” Sam jokes, scuffing at the back of his neck. “That’s, what, two messed-up buildings out of twenty? I think I’m getting the hang of this.” He tugs his disc off its mount, pulls up a copy of his blueprints. It all seems structurally sound on paper, so whatever’s bothering Rinzler must be something subtle, some detail, that Sam failed to pick up on. “Where’s the problem?”</p><p>Rinzler’s growl warps. Sharply.</p><p><em>I think he’s… irritated,</em> Sam decides, and looks up from the warm, blue light of his diagrams to see—</p><p>
  <em>Oh.</em>
</p><p><em>Yep, that’s more than a detail</em>.</p><p>The entire back wall of the tower is glitching. Spazzing, in and out of sight. Questioning its relationship with existence, like it can’t decide whether or not it wants to stick around. And Sam, personally, would very much prefer the wall to stick around; it’s <em>load-bearing</em>.</p><p>“Where—” he waves a hand at the glitch, lets his fingertips alight on, pinch at, the bridge of his nose. “Where is it going?”</p><p>Rinzler shifts his weight, uncertain.</p><p>Dead laughter leaks from Sam’s lungs, drawn out into a hiss. “Yeah, sure, screw physics,” he snipes. “‘S not like we needed physics. Nope. What’s conservation of matter, anyway?”</p><p>Apparently, optional.</p><p>“Hey. I’ll work on this; you go check the rest of this place for other problems.”</p><p>Nodding slightly, Rinzler turns around, locates the entrance to the stairwell. He tackles the stairs with a jagged limp, and Sam cringes, makes a mental note to learn to program those platform elevators he remembers from his first visit to the Grid.</p><p>
  <em>But figure out the wall, first.</em>
</p><p>Sam doesn’t risk touching it. Doesn’t want to know what’ll happen if he mixes his own molecules into the strobing, grey shadows flickering in and out of being. Through the wavering blur, he can see the road outside, the row of buildings across the street. And he smells something like scorched rubber, tastes it: thick and torrid, slicked over the back of his throat.</p><p>Again, the wall shivers. Sparks.</p><p>But this time, something drops out of it. It lands soft on the toe of Sam’s shoe, and his first assumption (heart dropped deep in his gut) is that <em>holyfrickincrap</em> the building is shedding debris; he and Rinzler need to vacate the premises, pronto. His second assumption is that he must’ve carried a spider—and yeah, that looks like a spider—into the Grid with him from the user world.</p><p>His third assumption sits quiet, tentative, in a back corner of his brain, and tells him that the Grid is generating lifeforms. Evolving. That it did so in a past life, too, and that Sam understands very little about the ethereal eternity from which he constructed this sanctuary. Very little about the primordial ooze bleeding onto its shores.</p><p>“Hey,” he breathes, lowering himself into a squat with knees creaking.</p><p>There’s a small, geometric <em>thing</em> on his foot, stagger-crawling around like it’s dazed, and Sam has no idea what to make of it. He pokes its glossy shell with a finger, watches it skitter sideways. It has strange coloring: cold black, except for a single band of watery light, bright red, twined around its center. A strange shape, too, all sterile lines and spindled, clicking legs. It’s as glassy, alien, inorganic as everything else on the Grid.</p><p>Except, in some ways, it isn’t.</p><p>“You look like a virus,” Sam murmurs. Like a distant memory: high school, freshman bio. Like an echo distorted. All at once too familiar and too twisted for comfort.</p><p>The creature snags its needle legs against the laces of Sam’s shoes, hitches up toward his ankle. With a palm, Sam presses his jeans down flat against his shin, doesn’t let it crawl inside his pants. There’s something uncanny about its erratic motions, the way it twitches, lurches from side to side—</p><p>“Sam.”</p><p>His head snaps up. <em>Rinzler?</em></p><p>There’s a hand wrapped tight around Sam’s bicep, pinching his skin, yanking—his shoulder pulls tight in its socket—voxels blood-red on the floor as the wall explodes, and <em>crud that’s a lot of virus-spiders</em> and Rinzler’s left hand jerks with a spasm—</p><p>
  <em>(Sam is choking. Crawling, hands and knees, to the door.)</em>
</p><p>Right hand swinging. Disc in the wall.</p><p>
  <em>(Breathe in.)</em>
</p><p>A dense weight on his spine, knocking him flat, pinning him.</p><p>
  <em>(Breathe out.)</em>
</p><p>The building collapses.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The debris cloud rolls over them like a storm, light and dark in flashes. Suffocating.</p><p>The body curled on top of Sam’s is startlingly solid and warm.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>There’s dust in Sam’s eyes, but his arms are immobilized under Rinzler’s dead weight, so he can’t try to smear it out. Can’t move. Can’t do much other than <em>ache.</em> “You’re too heavy,” he wheezes. “Dude—”</p><p>Rinzler rolls off him, the sharp edges of his armor grinding against Sam’s spine. And Sam doesn’t bruise easily, but it’ll be a pleasant surprise if he checks a mirror and doesn’t find a pattern pressed red-raw into his back.</p><p>He spits out damp grit, pulls himself up onto sore knees and elbows. “What was that thing?” he squints at the rubble pile, all grey cubes and dust, where the building once stood. “Were they all <em>inside</em> that wall?”</p><p>Rinzler, kneeling beside him, nods. And droops into the motion—chin dropped to chest, listing sideways. His damaged left arm hangs low across his torso, and Sam blinks. Has to blink again. The sleek, black armor that used to cover Rinzler’s arm, from shoulder to fingertips, looks… faded. Transparent white, like bloodless skin, broken glass. Some weird, digital equivalent of necrotic tissue, frail and brittle.</p><p>
  <em>That’s not good.</em>
</p><p>Sam works his jaw, tries to hide his double-take behind a question, a distraction. “Did the glitch in the wall create those things?”</p><p>The program shakes his head, faintly.</p><p>“Other way around? Those things created the glitch?”</p><p>Rinzler confirms it, and Sam flips himself onto his back, gives a low whistle. “Awesome. They’re gonna be a problem, aren’t they?”</p><p>If they managed to spawn once, they’ll spawn again. Easy. At least this swarm got exterminated by Rinzler. Who dropped a building on them. And who’s currently slumped over near Sam, shocky and in <em>visible</em> pain. As Sam watches, a shudder wrenches through Rinzler’s left arm, elbow to fingertips, and the program curls, shoulders rigid, around the mangled limb.</p><p>“You tried to reach for your disc with that arm,” Sam observes, and of course it went badly—the chunk missing from Rinzler’s bicep looks larger than normal, ripped open farther by his movements. By his immediate instinct to go for his disc with his <em>left arm.</em></p><p>As Sam watches, breathes through the iron fear in his chest, a white-blue arc of electricity sparks, skitters across the ragged length of the wound like wires misfiring. And a pale, neon fluid spirals down Rinzler’s arm, staining his armor iridescent.</p><p>A droplet hits the floor, scatters.</p><p>
  <em>(User.)</em>
</p><p>“You’re left-handed.” Sam nods, gestures toward the arm in question with his chin. “Like Alan.”</p><p>“Alan_One,” Rinzler rasps, and if the low rattle in his chest bucks against the name, renders it near incoherent, Sam doesn’t mention it.</p><p>“Alan_One,” he agrees. A sigh shakes loose at the base of his throat, leaves his lips trembling. Clenching his jaw, Sam falls back onto the ground, hooks a hand around the front of his throat and searches until he can feel his pulse beat, warm, against numbed fingertips.</p><p><em>Easy. It’s okay. Just breathe through it</em>.</p><p>“Just gonna—” he blinks, feels a slow, rolling fire sting behind his eyes— “gonna lay here for a sec.”</p><p>Stiffly, haltingly, Rinzler imitates him. The program lowers himself to the ground and curls into a ball, limp with exhaustion. Sam swallows back an inexplicable urge to reach out, to insert a hand between Rinzler’s helmet and the desolate expanse of the floor. To stare into the sky above them, into that endless, dizzying universe, and know that at least he didn’t come into this world alone.</p><p>He turns, looks into the program’s helmet. “You saved my life. Again. Third time, right?”</p><p>Rinzler’s taps a finger against the ground.</p><p>Sam takes it as acknowledgement, feels a smile twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Thank you.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>He stands in his bathroom. Listens to the sound of his own breathing, how it seems to absorb into the walls.</p><p>
  <em>It’s too small in here.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Too dead.</em>
</p><p>From shoulder blades to waist, Sam’s skin is discolored, swollen warm, where the edges of Rinzler’s armor dug deep into his muscle. It’s weird, having the evidence of the program’s existence bruised into his body. Weird, carrying a part of the Grid with him into the user world.</p><p>
  <em>There’s no escape. Not from this.</em>
</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Sam steps into the Grid and tastes lightning.</p><p>Ozone and frayed wires and the fetor of creation, clean on his tongue.</p><p>“I’m here,” he greets, and Rinzler’s head twitches to the side, almost playful. <em>No kidding, Sam.</em></p><p>Rocking back on his heels, Sam watches Rinzler shift his weight. Watches him settle his body onto his right leg; watches him clasp at, cradle, the elbow of his left arm. He notices how the lines and angles of Rinzler’s body skew around the fissures in his skin and armor, and can’t pin his worry (his concern, his unease, his <em>horror</em>) under the steel pressure of apathy any longer. He wasn’t supposed to care so much about this world.</p><p>Wasn’t supposed to transplant his own heart into this creation.</p><p>
  <em>But here we are.</em>
</p><p>“You’re in pain,” Sam says. <em>Pleads.</em> “Let me help you.”</p><p>Rinzler steps forward.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Since he was seven years old, there’s been a cavern torn into his chest, somewhere just behind his heart and lungs, inaccessible.</p><p>Weightlessly heavy.</p><p>Large and pockmarked with ragged edges, far too fundamental to his existence to ignore—<em>in the end, this pain is, and I am, altogether, Sam Flynn.</em></p><p>Even now, twenty years after his dad first disappeared, after Sam first took a blow like a gunshot to his back, he can still reach for the old hurt and easily find it. Maybe it would’ve healed completely by now, if his stubbornness hadn’t latched onto it, but no.</p><p>No.</p><p>Sam Flynn is short-tempered, unsocial, afraid. He carries grief like sepsis in his blood, like rot. He’s nothing more than a pale imitation of his father: Kevin Flynn as portrayed by a corroded mirror.</p><p>When Quorra first rescued Sam, bringing him to the Outlands, his dad explained Clu’s origins, his anger, and Sam’s only thought (<em>pulsing</em> in his head like a migraine) was <em>you recreated me. Why?</em></p><p>Sam doesn’t know how his dad would’ve replied to that. Doesn’t know what Quorra would say now if Sam mentioned his thoughts; she’s still walking around him on glass shards, tentative and war-torn and slowly settling in.</p><p>But Rinzler gives his disc to Sam without a beat of hesitation, his chin held high, trust unspoken.</p><p>And Sam knows that Clu never earned this.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“The Big Bang theory,” Sam explains, “claims that the entire universe—the entire <em>user</em> universe—started as a single, insanely dense point in the middle of nowhere. It exploded, expanded into a cosmos. Something infinitely small altered into something infinitely large.” He snaps his fingers. “Just like that.”</p><p>Beneath Sam’s palms, Rinzler’s code, a constellation of oversaturated white, rotates. Flickers, almost like a heartbeat. Sam would compare it to a flame: fragile, lambent, with both energy and spirit intertwined in a way Sam will never be able to comprehend. It would be too easy to take advantage of this. To snuff out Rinzler’s life, candlelight stifled between fingertips. </p><p>The thought sits cold at the base of Sam’s skull, trickles down his spine like ice.</p><p>“But.” He gnaws at his cheek, feels old bites, a habit of his, sting beneath his teeth. “Other users have different theories. Maybe the universe is cyclic, constantly regenerating itself. ‘S not unlike what happened in here, if you think about it.”</p><p>Sam was right about one thing: Rinzler’s code is a wreck. It’s stunted and ruptured and choked out, coated in a spidery film of crimson rust. A veil of blood. Alan’s work—an elegant scaffolding of code, lucid white—is near unrecognizable beneath the corrosion, and Sam shakes his head, spits out a harsh sigh. “Ah, crap.”</p><p>Rinzler’s growl spikes, blurs into a low, distressed hum.</p><p>“No. Hey.” Sam waves at Rinzler, waits until Rinzler’s helmet tips up and away from the holographic carnage emanating from the disc. “Just focus on me, alright? That’s it.”</p><p>Rinzler’s chest hitches with something that might be a sob, truncated and eerily silent.</p><p>
  <em>Screw it.</em>
</p><p>Cautious, Sam scoots closer to the program—not close enough to touch, but close enough that he feels the hard ridges of Rinzler’s shoulder and bicep press into the wrinkled edge of his jacket sleeve. “It’s going to be okay,” he promises, and he catches Rinzler’s shaking fingers (his gloves are cool and leathery; the circuits on his knuckles, water-warm) in his own hand. Squeezes. </p><p>“I grew up studying the way Alan codes—” <em>I’ve studied your code, and it’s revolutionary, insane; in the 80s, it was already more adaptable than programs being written today</em>— “and I think I can replicate it.” He tucks his lower lip between teeth, scrapes at a film of dry skin. “Might take a few tries, but I’m going to repair everything Clu broke.”</p><p>Rinzler dips his chin slightly. Sam pretends it’s a nod. Agreement. Hope.</p><p>“Anyway,” he forces out. The word drags in Sam’s throat, chafes, and he has to cough. “About creation? Some users have a different theory entirely. Turns out a lot of us think we have our own users, these—these gods, these deities—that created us. Maybe they’re still around, controlling us. Maybe they made us and disappeared.” He sighs, stifles a spasm of laughter that feels too sharp, too hysterical, in his lungs. “It’s weird. Absence seems to be the legacy of a lot of gods around here.”</p><p>Slowly, Rinzler’s head lolls sideways, onto Sam’s shoulder.</p><p>The sleek planes of his helmet grate against bone, and it aches, but Sam doesn’t dare move an inch.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It’s not difficult to pinpoint what a physical injury—a fracture, a cut, a burn (code turned brittle, chalky)—look and read like within the web of Rinzler’s code.</p><p>It’s not difficult to discover that this error, <em>this one right here,</em> corresponds to the missing voxels and circuit breakage in Rinzler’s left arm. <em>These</em> errors, to the dented pit in his chest. <em>This</em> one, marked low priority, represents the crack in Rinzler’s helmet, and at least that damage is entirely superficial; it doesn’t even reach skin.</p><p>Turns out, though, there are more of these errors riddled through Rinzler’s code than Sam can see. More injuries, hidden beneath sections of armor left completely intact. Injuries that couldn’t have been caused by Rinzler’s fall into the sea.</p><p>Indomitable AI or not, if Clu were to manifest in front of them, Sam would tear the admin’s throat open with his bare hands.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“How do you feel?”</p><p>“Invalid query.”</p><p>Maybe Rinzler’s programming, damaged as it is, can’t recognize the question. Maybe Rinzler just doesn’t want to answer. A familiar reluctance, that. The city, those bugs, Rinzler’s stubbornness and pain—they’re all just artifacts of the user world, living ideas, dragged into the Grid and given newer, sleeker faces.</p><p>Given a facade of perfection.</p><p>Sam shrugs it off, brushes a hand over Rinzler’s left shoulder, which is solid beneath Sam’s palm: healed and intact and faintly warm with existence.</p><p>“No problem,” he jokes. “It’s a fair response.”</p><p>
  <em>It’s not my place to give you crap about it, anyway.</em>
</p><p>“I’ve been thinking—”</p><p>About a lot of things. Quorra. Kevin Flynn. The Grid, and Sam’s own hand in destroying it, and what he really owes to a voiceless graveyard that would never have to know if Sam gave up, stepped away.</p><p>About how he doesn’t want to create something stunted and piecemeal, half-baked, broken before it ever gets the chance to live.</p><p>Inside his pockets, Sam’s hands flex, hard, then constrict into fists. “I’ve been thinking that I want to expand the Grid to—to its original size and capabilities. Whatever it was before.” Not a computer, not exactly. Something far more human. Visceral. Self-sufficient. “If I’m remembering this correctly, it was able to generate its own terrain and life forms. To progress, amirite?”</p><p>And maybe, if they let this universe function as it’s meant to, the very thought of the Grid won’t sit stagnant in Sam’s chest. Maybe he’ll finally stop clinging to ghosts. Maybe he and Rinzler both will remember how to breathe right, two men rescued from a dead land.</p><p>“We need more programs, too,” Sam suggests, and he glances up from his shoes. </p><p><em>I don’t want you to be alone down here,</em> he thinks, and hopes Rinzler can read it—can read all the words lost in Sam’s head—in the way he stands, the way a slight frown works its way into his forehead.</p><p>Rinzler rolls his shoulders back. He seems stiffer than usual.</p><p>
  <em>And that’s… yeah, that’s saying something.</em>
</p><p>Averting his gaze again, Sam delivers his final idea: “if you disagree, I won’t go through with it.”</p><p>Something blunt nudges at Sam’s shoulder. Just two points of contact, of heat and light and life, in the darkness of the Grid. Just two fingers, gentle, pressed into Sam’s skin. And, all at once, it means <em>look at me, Sam,</em> and <em>I trust you,</em> and <em>okay, let’s do this.</em></p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>From the roof of a building, they watch the land corporealize: a web of data, iridescent blue, uncoiling over the ocean and flickering, converting into grey rock and dust.</p><p>“Wonder how my dad felt, when he first made this place,” Sam muses—there’s an old grass stain on the knee of his jeans, and he picks at it, feels fibers snag against fingernails bitten jagged.</p><p>Hunched into himself, toes lined up with the edge of the roof, Rinzler declines to reply.</p><p>So Sam makes his best guess, rolls his eyes. “Like a god, I bet.” Because Kevin Flynn didn’t see people, he saw buttons to press and raw nerves to test. Because he pushed at boundaries and frontiers, one discovery after another, never looking twice at the problems he left behind him. And Sam? Sam seemed to occupy some strange, cozy space at the eye of Kevin’s storm, exempt from his dad’s neglect, though he never understood it.</p><p>Still doesn’t.</p><p>“Screw that,” he decides, bumping the side of his foot against Rinzler’s. “I’m just a person—”</p><p>“User.”</p><p>“Relax,” Sam chides, because he doesn’t like it when Rinzler’s rattle acts up, grates like metal in the program’s chest. He doesn’t like it when Rinzler seems distressed, unhappy. “Person, user, it’s all the same. Point is, I’m not a god.” <em>Just a creator, and I dunno the difference yet, but I’ll tell you, someday.</em> “That’s what I want other programs to know, when they show up. I’m not their god. Just Sam Flynn.”</p><p>Just Sam Flynn, bruised and bleeding and fumbling his way through survival. Declaring his name from the depths of an arena, in the gold-stained shadow of Clu’s presence, with Rinzler standing beside him.</p><p>Nothing much has changed since that moment, and Sam takes more comfort from the fact than he probably should.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Quorra spends a lot of time beside the river in Sam’s backyard. Reading. Thinking. Kicking up muddy water. She tends to wander back into the house with a grey-mottled face, tracking slick footprints behind her.</p><p>This time around, Sam follows her outside, brings dinner with him (two boxes of pop-tarts, different flavors—blatant bribery, but who cares, really).</p><p>He doesn’t tiptoe around his curiosity, because Quorra has a nose for BS and no problem calling Sam out over it. Most likely, she developed it over a millennium of dealing with his dad. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” Sam starts, cautious, sitting down beside her. “But I’d like to know more. About you. Where you came from.”</p><p>Her response is acerbic, withered dry. “Sea of Simulation.” She makes short work of the foil covering her food, crinkles it up, and tosses it at Sam’s face.</p><p>He stands his ground, lets it hit him in the nose. “That’s why you like the river so much?”</p><p>At that, she finally sighs. Finally lets her mask crack and twist into a scowl. And Sam has to breathe steady through laughter, because yeah, it really doesn’t take much to step over Quorra’s defenses. She’s tired, drained, sure—but she’s also heart-on-her-sleeve, cards open, just like Sam.</p><p>“The river isn’t anything like the sea,” she admits, and doesn’t meet Sam’s eyes, electing to stare down the frosting on her pop-tart. “It’s empty. Cold. It was never—” she hesitates— “never <em>alive</em>.”</p><p>Nothing like the all-consuming presence of the Grid’s ocean, its life blood. Nothing like Quorra’s home. “I’m sorry,” Sam says.</p><p>“Don’t.” Quorra shakes her head. “I like it. It feels safer this way.” She crams one corner of her pop-tart into her mouth, and Sam lets her have her distraction.</p><p>He watches the evening sun hover over skyscrapers. Over glass and cement, all of it dirty and white-hot blinding. This world is nothing like the Grid he remembers, with its aggressive architecture and calculated lighting, its unearthly elegance. There’s nothing <em>perfect</em> here, and if Clu had made it through the portal, the admin might’ve just curled into a ball and broken down over the impossibility of ever changing that.</p><p>It’s Quorra, surprisingly, who restarts their conversation, her voice far less reluctant than Sam expected: “I don’t remember what it was like. Being created.”</p><p>“No,” Sam agrees.</p><p>She pulls her knees up to her chin, stacks her arms on top of them. “I almost remember that it took… a while. Cycles, possibly, or just nanos, but I had never <em>existed</em> before, and I think any amount of time would’ve felt the same to me. It was like I was halfway aware, halfway in recharge.”</p><p>“What changed?”</p><p>A smile smooths over her mouth, shy, and Quorra ducks her head, hides her face inside her arms. “The voice of the Grid,” she mumbles, and Sam frowns, because it’s the first he’s hearing of anything like this. The first time he’s wondered if there’s really something to the revenant he can half-sense in the sea, lurking just below the surface.</p><p>“I heard it, like two hands on my shoulders, guiding me. And she doesn’t use words, but if she did, they would have been—” her eyebrows wrinkle; she’s trying to catch a blood-slick memory even as it slips out from between her hands. “Open your eyes. Come to the surface and see, and feel, and learn.”</p><p>Sam’s gut feels tight, burned. He abandons his pop-tart, props it up against his ankle to keep it out of the dirt. “What did you learn?” he asks.</p><p>With a low hum, Quorra curls up tighter, shelters herself against a cool brush of wind. “A lot. First, that there were others like me: ISOs. And that the world was born dark so that it could cradle light in its palms. We saw Tron City illuminated in the distance, and it was beautiful.”</p><p><em>A deception, more than anything else,</em> Sam knows. Wryly, he thinks of the ISOs as insects, drawn to the light. Too fragile, free, and Clu took full advantage of that to destroy them. “Then,” he fills in the blanks with what he knows, what his dad told him, “Clu infected the sea.”</p><p>She nods—a curt movement, and her arms get in the way, cut it short. “He decided the Grid had no room for my people. For errors.”</p><p>And Sam has no response to that. Quorra speaks an agony that he’ll never be able to understand.</p><p>“I escaped. I was—I don’t know, Sam—smart enough, quick enough to manage it. Other programs helped me, but I was the one who knew when to start running, and what to watch out for, and how to hide what I am. Sometimes I—I felt the Grid wonder if I remembered her, and I thought <em>no</em>. No, I don’t belong to you. I won’t be like the others; I don’t deserve to die.”</p><p>A chill, iron-cold, rattles down the length of Sam’s spine.</p><p>“But,” Quorra huffs, one hand cupping, hiding, her bicep. “I could never manage to hide for long. The Grid doesn’t let go of what belongs to her.”</p><p>“Is the water still—”</p><p>“No. No,” she says, “after a few cycles, the sea managed to burn through Clu’s infection. Flynn checked.”</p><p>“So maybe, one day, there’ll be other ISOs.” Other life, born into primordial waters, searching for distant lights on the shore.</p><p>Shrugging, Quorra lets her eyes wander over to the river, wrinkled silver and orange. “Maybe. I almost hope not.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It takes hours before Quorra begins to uncoil. Hours before she looks Sam in the eyes, city lights reflecting sharp in her irises, and explains what’s still bothering her. The moon is a sliver, powder-soft, suspended in a sky as dark as the Grid.</p><p>“I know what your father told you about me,” Quorra begins, and Sam startles. “I know what he thought. I was afraid and alone, yes, but I’m not that naive. Or impulsive. Or—or functionless. ”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“And I should be grateful to your father. I don’t understand why I’m so angry; I’m exhausted—”</p><p>“Quorra, I know.”</p><p>Her throat jumps, and she bites down hard on the inside of one cheek. Closes her eyes.</p><p>“Hey,” Sam breathes, tasting warm copper like blood on his tongue. “Forget my dad, okay? Screw him.” <em>Just this once. Just between two people who loved Kevin Flynn enough to understand what it is to hate him.</em> “Forget everyone, Q, you owe them nothing. You belong to yourself.”</p><p>“Sam—”</p><p>“That’s it. End of story.”</p><p><em>“Sam,”</em> she repeats, but her voice stumbles over laughter, and she doesn’t try to wriggle free when Sam drapes an arm across her shoulders and pulls her into his side.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>In the Outlands, Rinzler sheds a weight like water off his shoulders. He plants his feet on solid ground, steadies himself, and draws up to his full height—standing taller than Sam, now—as if he can finally breathe. As if, even on the dry streets of the city, he was still drowning, drifting down through the infinite depths of the sea.</p><p>(His circuits like stars; water like the vacuum of space: sleep-dark and enormous.)</p><p>In the Outlands, Sam watches Rinzler relax and feels a pain like hydrogen gas in his lungs, like coarse friction in his throat. <em>Catch and ignite.</em> It <em>hurts</em> to talk, every inhalation feeding the flames, but Sam forces his voice to function, regardless. “Come on,” he says, hooking a palm around the crook of Rinzler’s elbow. “Let’s go see what’s out there.”</p><p>There’s a tangible shift in the atmosphere between the Outlands and the coastal city left behind them. The air here tastes voltaic, decayed, on Sam’s tongue. He aches like he’s walking on raw skin, over a world <em>scorched</em> into existence from nothing: still new, still fragile. Still untainted by the blood, voxels, and history soaked dark into the Sea of Simulation.</p><p>Half an hour into their exploration, the aqua-tinged gleam of the portal and surrounding metropolis fades. Rinzler has no trouble navigating the darkness; Sam, close to sightless, just hangs onto the program’s arm, walks an inch or two behind him. Or beneath him, sometimes, and entirely by accident—the one time Rinzler does stumble, it’s over Sam’s foot (“Ow.”), and a disgruntled <em>beep</em> bleeds out of Rinzler’s throat that Sam will never let the program live down.</p><p>Forty minutes, give or take, and the flat darkness splinters. Breaks.</p><p>Between grey rocks, veins of asymmetrical light—solid shards of it, barbed, or broad and molten pools—marble the black terrain. Sharp white, almost celestial, limns the edges of cliffs and narrow faults torn into the ground. It’s just enough light for Sam to see a few feet in front of him. Just enough light to notice the texture of the Outlands change, stuttering, into something more tooth-marked and rugged, unrefined.</p><p>It’s Rinzler who catches hold of Sam’s sleeve at the shoulder, pulls him to a stop. He lowers himself into a crouch beside one of the pools of light, all lithe grace and coiled power, unhindered by the visible agony he used to carry like armor. On the glassy surface of his helmet, a reflection of the pool wavers, twists.</p><p>“Looks like water,” Sam observes, tangling fingers into his hair. “More than the sea does, anyway.” He hesitates to get any closer, though—he’s learned his lesson about messing with the Grid, touching things he doesn’t understand.</p><p>There’s something sharp-edged, almost mischievous, in the angles of Rinzler’s body as he gestures to Sam, jabs a finger toward the ground beside him. <em>Sit.</em></p><p>Sam sits.</p><p>He watches, sucks in a harsh breath (<em>don’t touch it, don’t touch it</em>) as Rinzler lowers one hand into the hyaloid liquid, smooths over the iridescent wrinkles coruscating across its surface. The luster of the fluid seems to <em>seep</em> into the skeletal circuits on Rinzler’s fingers, flushing them white-hot, and when the program pulls his hand out, a silver sheen clings to his glove.</p><p>Biting his tongue, Sam surveys the transfer of light and abruptly realizes the liquid isn’t illuminated. It’s more like—it <em>is</em> the illumination.</p><p>
  <em>Huh.</em>
</p><p>“Can I—” Tentative, Sam hovers one palm over the pool, glances at Rinzler for confirmation. The program nods, and Sam takes his word for it. <em>Why not?</em> Centimeter by centimeter, he lowers his hand into the liquid, wrist-deep. Wiggles his fingers. Shivers— “whoa, crap—” as a faint static shock ripples through him in a wave, burns his submerged hand ice-cold.</p><p>It’s quick and sudden and <em>startling</em>, but there’s no pain. Sam jerks his hand halfway out of the water before his brain tells him to cool down, get a grip. Sam lets the muscles in his arm unclench. “What was that?”</p><p>Beside him, Rinzler shakes his head, shoulders jumping. It takes Sam, squinting, a moment to process the strange motion. To notice that it resembles… laughter.</p><p>“Hilarious.” The complaint comes out of him deadpan, blunt with disbelief, weighed down by some other emotion <em>(fondness)</em> that Sam really doesn’t want to contemplate. Not here. “Yeah, thanks, dude, I really appreciated the warning.” It’s curiosity that has him easing his arm back in to the elbow, swishing his hand through the liquid. He tests its consistency—it feels finer, freer, than water—and flexes his fingers, searching for evidence of the electric current that snapped through him.</p><p>It prickles at his fingertips, just out of reach.</p><p>Rinzler shifts, drawing Sam’s attention. Indicating the water with one hand, he mimes cupping it in his palm, bringing it up to his mouth.</p><p>“It’s food,” Sam guesses.</p><p>Rinzler’s head angles sideways in its usual gesture of confusion, and Sam frowns. Problem is, Rinzler’s silence isn’t the only communication barrier between them. It’s easy—too easy, sometimes—to forget the Grid had its own culture, its own science and lingo and reality, that Sam never learned. That he might never learn, because the Grid as Sam knew it was torn down to atoms, with only two survivors remaining: Quorra and Rinzler.</p><p>And two people hardly make for an immersive experience.</p><p>Withdrawing his hand, shaking off beads of liquid, Sam tries again. “Is this fuel?” A memory nudges at the back of his mind—he’s standing on the Solar Sailer, his vision colored dark with hazy fear and bone-deep exhaustion, his body stiff with bruises. His dad hands him a small tube of <em>something</em> and instructs him to give it to Quorra. “Some source of energy?”</p><p>Perking up, Rinzler nods.</p><p>“Can users drink it? Or would—I dunno—would it kill me?”</p><p>A pause, then Rinzler shakes his head.</p><p>“It won’t kill me?”</p><p>
  <em>No.</em>
</p><p>It’s a negative on the killing, sure, but Rinzler’s response is far from <em>go for it, Sam.</em> Which Sam doesn’t pick up on until a few seconds too late, until the liquid is already dripping down his chin, carving a path through his throat, and <em>crap crap crap that tastes like battery acid, feels like battery acid; can’t breathe—</em></p><p>The noise that squeezes out of him, like a deflating balloon, is completely unintelligible even before Sam chokes on it. His body spasms, forces him through a series of barking coughs. He gasps. Slams his eyes shut.</p><p>Rinzler’s hand brushes over Sam’s shoulders, patting lightly, and in any other situation Sam would be touched by the concern—but it was Rinzler who did this to Sam. So screw him.</p><p>
  <em>“Whoa.”</em>
</p><p>That—that word actually came out right.</p><p>“Packs a punch,” Sam wheezes. “Oh, man.” The pain’s going away, but it’s all bleeding down into his gut, his limbs, and he feels <em>wired.</em> “Prob’ly what’d happen ‘f I mixed straight caffeine into 5-Hour Energy; <em>holy crud.”</em></p><p>The hand on his spine, now dragging cautious circles over Sam’s shirt, stills. And of course Rinzler wouldn’t know anything about random user products.</p><p>“I’m good,” Sam says, blinking a film of tears out of his eyes. “Don’t worry about it.”</p><p>Look at that—his fingers are twitching.</p><p>
  <em>Weird.</em>
</p><p>“You drink this stuff?” he asks.</p><p>Rinzler nods, blurs the movement into a shrug that might mean <em>sort of,</em> or might just be a sheepish expression.</p><p>The laugh that bubbles up in Sam’s chest, bursts out of him limp and watery, has an edge of hysteric mirth to it. “‘S all yours, then.” He throws his hand in the general direction of the liquefied lightning. “I’m not touching it.”</p><p>One heartbeat.</p><p>Two.</p><p>Three, and an alarm goes off in Sam’s head: <em>something’s off.</em></p><p>Rinzler is dead silent. Not rattling, not moving, as if every process inside him locked up and shut down. It takes two snaps of Sam’s fingers before Rinzler shakes himself, shifts his weight back away from the pool. One hand jerks up toward his head in a short, aborted motion, then falls to his side.</p><p>It takes too long (it’s been weeks too long, honestly) for Sam to put the dots together: the helmet, the face hidden beneath it, everything Sam <em>doesn’t</em> know about what Clu did to Rinzler.</p><p>To Tron.</p><p>“You can’t take it off, can you?”</p><p>He doesn’t like the way Rinzler’s posture withers. Doesn’t like the way the program tries to make himself small and crooked, hiding in shoulders curled up by his ears. Doesn’t like how the retreat reeks of terror and shame and anticipation.</p><p>Sam’s heart lurches.</p><p>“I didn’t know,” he manages to say. Repeats it— “I swear I didn’t know—” and makes the statement solemn. A promise. <em>If I had known, I would’ve done something about it. I wouldn’t have left you trapped in there, starving.</em></p><p>And underneath it all, an unspoken question gnaws at him: <em>why didn’t you tell me, show me?</em></p><p>“Hey. Let me see?”</p><p>Reaching for his shoulders, Rinzler draws his disc, places it in Sam’s outstretched hand. His grip falters, trembles, but he doesn’t let go. Not this time. Forcing out a strangled exhale, Sam pushes the disc back toward the program. “You can hold it,” he suggests. “Just like that—easy. Easy.”</p><p>The process doesn’t take long. Sam activates the user interface, locates the function, overrides the locks Clu warped into it. The simplicity of it chafes against his heart. Clu probably finished this edit in a second, Sam undoes it in two, but repairing it completely, piecing together the fragments of Rinzler’s mind, will take so much longer.</p><p>Could take forever.</p><p>
  <em>It’s unjust. Nothing that happened in this hell was just, and who am I to think I can do any better?</em>
</p><p>“There we go,” Sam murmurs, releasing Rinzler’s disc. He tries to unknot the scowl on his forehead, to relax. “Try it out.”</p><p>Rinzler returns the disc to his shoulders, syncs up with it. Raising one hand, he reaches to the back of his helmet—and Sam averts his gaze. Watches his own hands clench in his lap, fingers tangling around each other.</p><p>Rinzler’s helmet releases without fanfare, and with faint click, a metallic whir. With a feather-light breath, carried past Sam’s ear—all at once relieved and desperate—as a quiet rush of air. No longer muffled, Rinzler’s growl picks up a sharper, more guttural quality.</p><p>Sam doesn’t let himself stare as Rinzler runs a hand over his face once (and again, more slowly, almost reverent) before turning to the pool to drink, but he can’t help glancing. Can’t help but notice, in flickering glimpses, a resemblance to <em>Alan</em>: neat bone structure, narrow eyes, soft-dust hair. Can’t ignore the coarse, grey scar sprawling over Rinzler’s features, from missing eye to jaw to throat.</p><p>“Do you wanna go back?”</p><p>Rinzler’s head tilt is accompanied by a slight tic at the corner of his cheek. He gestures vaguely toward the city—<em>go back</em>—and refuses to look at Sam, his discomfiture far more disciplined than Sam’s awkward attempts to give Rinzler his privacy.</p><p>Sam offers a hand to the program. Rinzler takes it.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It’s strange.</p><p>There’s so much more to this program, to the person slumped against Sam’s chest, than <em>just Rinzler</em>.</p><p>There’s the bristle of hair, helmet-matted, over Sam’s throat, and the lithe contours of one shoulder pressed against Sam’s, and the way the program’s throat leaps whenever the pain spikes. The way he wraps one hand—all slender fingers with strength enough to hurt, to kill—around Sam’s forearm and braces himself, grinding Sam’s bones to dust, as Sam restructures (the equivalent being: re-breaks and cauterizes) lines of mangled code.</p><p>And there’s the murky filth, all hot fluid and dead voxels and a stench like rot, that he coughs up when Sam tackles the old wounds on his face and neck.</p><p>Rinzler is stubborn, dignified. Fragile, albeit in his own way.</p><p>Viscerally alive.</p><p>It’s not a computer, devoid of hurt or emotion, that Sam is trying to fix. So he adjusts accordingly. Treads lightly in this new territory as he tries to comfort Rinzler in any way he can.</p><p>“I noticed there’s not a lot of temperature on the Grid,” Sam comments. “It’s a pretty temperate climate, am I right?” He receives no response—expects no response—and hums, lets his mind go loose and tip into wandering. Rambling. Which doesn’t come naturally to him, not after years of keeping to himself, but he tries his best. “It’s warm here. Nice. Reminds me of when I was a kid; I’d come home from school and spend, what, something like four, five hours on end in the backyard? Doing nothing, really, just <em>feeling.”</em></p><p>He pauses, stares down a complex mass of corrosion in Rinzler’s programming.</p><p>Beside him, Rinzler shifts, tucks his head more securely beneath Sam’s jaw.</p><p>“Anyway, that’s kinda what the Grid feels like. A summer night—no wind, nothing. Just stagnant heat, the kind that settles deep in the sidewalks and leaks out after the sun sets.” He sighs, feels something in his chest twinge. “The grass is too long, scraping up your legs, and it stinks like years of dust piled up in it, but you don’t care. You still sit down, sprawl out, whatever. Bare feet. Sticks in your hair. Spiders—” he wrinkles his nose— “which suck, frankly. Spiders are these little, freaky—you know what, they’re sorta like those bugs we found tearing down that one building. Less dangerous than those bugs, sure, but still obnoxious. About a hundred of them try to move into my apartment every spring, soon as the weather improves.”</p><p>Maybe he’s distracting Rinzler from his pain.</p><p>Maybe he’s boring the program to sleep, but that’s fine, that works.</p><p>Another edit, overwriting Clu’s violations, and this time, Rinzler doesn’t even flinch.</p><p>“I’m guessing stories about my world don’t make a lot of sense to you,” Sam admits, snorting. “That’s fine, though, I’ll take you out of this place someday, and you’ll see.”</p><p>Finally, Rinzler reacts. He jolts, settles down far too quickly, all <em>nothing happened; nothing to see here.</em></p><p>Sam bumps the top of Rinzler’s head with his jaw. “Yeah, I know.” <em>I get it, alright? But the thought makes sense, somehow, and I can’t let it go—</em> “Just think about it.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“My dad told me users are like gods to programs. Some programs. Do you really believe that?”</p><p>“I used to.”</p><p>Rinzler’s voice sounds soft, bruised. Which makes sense—a millennium of forced silence, of speaking a handful of words through a mutilated throat, would do that to a person. Sam wiggles out of his jacket, has to pull it free where its hem snags on the disc newly materialized on his shoulders. “When did it change?” he asks, and wonders if he’s pushing too hard, stepping over some line.</p><p>If he were speaking to Quorra, it would be easier to tell. But Rinzler is <em>Rinzler:</em> an extension of Alan’s mind, with all its subtle cunning, and of Tron’s stoicism, and of a helmet that stripped him of any ability to use facial expression. So Rinzler doesn’t even blink. Only lets his posture, head to shoulders, quirk to the side in the typical indication that he’s thinking, assessing his options.</p><p>“Sometime in between,” Rinzler says, every word slow and deliberate, “the fifth or sixth time <em>he</em> cut out my eye.”</p><p>
  <em>Oh.</em>
</p><p>A gear skips, clatters, in Sam’s head, and he swallows. Almost suffocates on nothing, on the swollen, viscous words knotted up in his throat. <em>That’s horrible, I’m sorry,</em> and <em>please tell me he stopped at six,</em> and <em>yeah, Clu really liked to dig into old wounds, didn’t he?</em></p><p>He ends up replying, croaking, “that doesn’t sound much like perfection.”</p><p>It sounds more like revenge, petty anger. Like a deluded zealot, waging his holy wars, leaving the tortured and murdered behind him and calling it heaven. A dictator, campaigning on false promises, not caring if his own soldier was limited or impaired so long as Tron suffered.</p><p>“No,” Rinzler agrees. “He had… too much of Flynn in him.”</p><p>Do I?</p><p>Sam nods, gnaws on his lip—there’s already a scab formed over the raw skin there, and it breaks easily, tastes faintly of iron. “So—” and he doesn’t know exactly how to phrase it— “if you don’t believe in gods. If you’re still here, if you wait for me at the portal every time it lights up, it’s not because you think you owe loyalty to a <em>user,</em> right?”</p><p>Rinzler gives no response.</p><p>Sam tries, and nearly fails, to stomach it.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“I still believe you should’ve derezzed him.”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“For mercy, if nothing else,” Quorra finishes, her voice a skein of regret and malice and gentle, pressing persuasion. She upends the mess of emotion into Sam’s lap and stares at him, expects him to pick apart the threads and make any sense of the uncertainty flickering behind her eyes.</p><p><em>“No,”</em> Sam repeats. Finalizes it. “If I had tried, he might have let me.” Might’ve been too exhausted, too abused, to fight back. “And I couldn’t have gone through with that.”</p><p>“I know,” she sighs.</p><p>Sam fumbles his way through explaining the idea he’s been nursing in his head, his heart, and informs Quorra that he’s thinking of bringing Rinzler out of the Grid, introducing him to the user world. Quorra takes it in stride, with nothing more than a furrow of her eyebrows.</p><p>“What color are his circuits?” <em>Is he a threat?</em></p><p>“White. Sort of bluish,” Sam replies. <em>No, he isn’t.</em></p><p>Quorra nods. “What name does he use?” she queries, and it sounds like acknowledgement. Empathy, maybe, for another victim of Clu’s insanity, who was forced to become something he never wanted to be.</p><p>“I don’t know,” Sam realizes, heart sinking. “I haven’t asked.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Sam stands at ground zero of the reintegration—it’s been a couple of months, now—and can no longer recognize it. Can no longer see ash and death and error within the future he’s started to pull together.</p><p>As always, a security program stands tall outside the portal; he silently watches Sam step toward him and holds still, trusting, as Sam hooks his palm over the junction between the program’s shoulder and neck, searching his face for hatred, resentment, <em>anything.</em> And Sam finds none of it.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he starts, carefully. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes here, with this place. With you. I never even asked you what your name is. I just—do you—do you <em>want</em> me to call you Rinzler?”</p><p>Cautious, the program shakes his head.</p><p>“How about Tron?”</p><p>Something in the set of the program’s face softens, falters, almost imperceptibly. As if he doesn’t dare confirm it, as if he’s asking permission, and that’s more than enough of an answer to be understood.</p><p>“Alright,” Sam says, fighting a smile, and he jostles Tron’s shoulder. “Sounds good. It’s nice to meet you, Tron.”</p>
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